Former leading New Zealand publisher and bookseller, and widely experienced judge of both the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Montana New Zealand Book Awards, talks about what he is currently reading, what impresses him and what doesn't, along with chat about the international English language book scene, and links to sites of interest to booklovers.

Saturday, January 19, 2008

PETER CAREY INTERVIEW

Between two worlds

Peter Carey has lived in New York for 20 years, but has returned repeatedly to his native Australia in his fiction. Both cultures have been the guiding spirit of his work

Nicholas Wroe writing in The Guardian Saturday January 19, 2008

A few years ago Peter Carey had a drink with his friend and fellow adopted New Yorker Patrick McGrath, the only other writer he "really talks to" about the practicalities of writing. Some time during the evening McGrath told Carey about an image he had of a man or woman standing on the edge of an airstrip, and how he knew it was the start of a novel but didn't quite know how to proceed.

"That notion of starting work on a novel from an image played on my mind," recallsCarey, "and soon enough I had my own picture of a woman and a childwalking along this particular road in Queensland with a storm on the way andcars driving past. At that stage I thought of them as a hippy mother and herlittle boy hitching from here to there. But I didn't really know much morethan that and although I tried to work it out, I ended up getting in a bit ofa tangle about what to do with them."

A few months later Carey met McGrath again and told him about the difficulties he was having with his image of the woman and boy. He asked how McGrath had dealt with his airstrip."'Oh that,' he said, 'I dropped that pretty quickly. It was goingnowhere.' So, thanks for that, Patrick!"But the idea did bear fruit and Carey's new novel, His Illegal Self, published next month, includes a young woman and a boy in rural early 70s Queensland. They are no longer motherand son and are in Australia having absconded from the upper-classrevolutionary end of the American counter culture. Another starting point forthe book was Carey's memories of his own time in a Queensland commune -"much hippier and less political than the one in the book" - when itturned out that someone who lived with them was on the run from the FBI forconspiracy to import cocaine. "All the things that happened around thatwere actually quite comic - driving around with bags of coins trying to call alawyer in Texas and so on - but it was also pretty scary and it stuck in mymind."

Carey has lived in New York for almost 20 years. But long before his move some of his earliest fiction reflected on the relationship between Australia and America with the 1974story "American Dreams" featuring American tourists arriving in asmall Australian town - "something utterly and surreally unlikely at thetime". However, throughout the rest of his career remarkably little ofhis work has been set in the country he now calls home. His early novels Bliss(1981) and Illywhacker (1985) were set in Australia as were, predominantly,the Booker prize winning Oscar and Lucinda (1988) and True History of theKelly Gang (2000). One of the fictional power blocs competing in The UnusualLife of Tristran Smith (1994) did evoke America, and his gloss on GreatExpectations, Jack Maggs (1997) inevitably made it to Dickens's England. Hismore recent novels My Life as a Fake (2003), Theft: A Love Story (2006) andnow His Illegal Self, have all ventured farther afield, including passages inAmerica, but Australia has remained his primary location and focus.